Rosanne Lester

Twitter is fabulous. I’ve had several people ask me why I like it so much, and I never seem to have a very coherent answer for them, but today I have a perfect example with which to illustrate this.

The scene: I was working on a document in class this afternoon, using Word 2007. When I tried to save my file in the ‘97-2003 compatibility mode, every bullet point I had ended up with 3/4 of a line of space in between the bullet and the first line of text. I was searching around word TRYING to figure it out (and getting more annoyed by the second). So out of my frustration, I posted this to Twitter:

I hate word 2007. anyone know why its decided to put a 3/4 of a page sized space in between the bullet and the first word of the text? erg!

This is a record of the conversation that ensued:

BethMelton: @zankhamun Check your paragraph indent. Right-click bullet list and then click Adjust Indent Levels.

zankhamun: @BethMelton okay thanks, I’ll try that. For some reason it only does it when I save the doc in the compatibility mode. weird.

BethMelton: @zankhamun Ah! Sounds like a tab. Check the ruler next time. If you see an “L”, select bullets and drag it off. This changed btween versions

zankhamun: @BethMelton awesome! thanks for the help

Now, this in itself, may not seem like such a big deal. I vented, someone helped me. To be honest, I had pretty much sorted the problem out for myself by that point. The cool thing is that the person who helped me works for Microsoft. I did not know this person beforehand, she is not one of the people that I follow, and she does not follow me. So basically, in a moment of me being annoyed and grumpy and mostly just posting that first tweet to gripe about the world, someone from Microsoft took the time to search twitter for posts relating to MS products to try and help their customers. It was like I went to the help/support page without actually having to go somewhere! Talk about pro-active customer service! Usually when I have a problem with some program, I have to spend a half hour digging around on the support page, sorting through 3000 links to try and find the actual way to contact someone who works in customer service. So I thought that was pretty awesome.

Another story: Besides using twitter to keep up with random things that are going on in my friends/library colleagues lives, I find it has a weird sort of serendipity to it (at least for me). Now, I got my twitter account sometime in the winter semester of 2008. I didn’t really use it for much, except posting updates to a few friends, and keeping track of what @wilw was up to. Anyways, in the summer sometime, @edbilodeau started following me, and I followed him back (I think because he and @jambina were also friends, but I don’t remember actually checking out what he had written on his profile). So one day I was griping (again with the griping, I promise I don’t only use twitter to gripe!) about how it was sooo annoying to have to bother the people that work in the IT lab at SIS to edit the links on the student’s life website. This was also right after Fiona (SIS’s Professional Associate, who was responsible for all things IT related) had left, so I wasn’t even sure who to go to talk to about it. (I recall bothering one of the student lab monitors about it a few times… I think she was getting annoyed with me . So I get this tweet from @edbilodeau that read:

@zankhamun re SIS web sites, not sure if I can help with this, but maybe drop by next week and we can see.

At this point I was a little confused… I was wondering why on earth this random person on my twitter feed thought he could help me with getting site managing access to the SIS page. Then I find out… he was hired as the new Prof. Associate. Now I have managing clearance to our very own SIS-Students site. So that’s another story of why I love twitter (and how I ‘met’ Ed!).

The moral of the story? You never know who you might end up chatting with, or how you can get help with things you never thought you could because of Twitter!

Well, this week the president of the CLA came to McGill to give a lunchtime talk for the students at SIS. Fortunately, we had a very good turn out this year (around 40) which was MUCH better then last year, so that was good to see. I’m on the CLA McGill student group exec, and while I didn’t have much of a hand in organising this particular event, its always nice to see a lot of students come to events that we’ve planned (especially after these very busy speakers have come all the way to talk to us). I must say, the group of first years that started in September are way more involved than those in my year! (And its a good thing too, because between the department and the 5 main student groups, I think there are about 3 days that don’t have anything scheduled between now and the middle of March!)

As far as the talk on Tuesday, I found Ken Roberts to be a very interesting speaker. He jumped around to different topics quite a bit, so at first I wasn’t entirely sure what to think, but it ended up being a very inspiring talk. He gave us some examples of how his passion for librarianship and how utilising the most current technology available had changed his (and his family’s) life. He also talked about library management and how achieving a ‘transformational organisation’ should be the goal of a manager. These organisations are constantly changing and evolving, and the best ones are able to make the need for job safety and security work with the need for change. He mentioned that this comes from knowing there will be a role for you to play in the organisation, even if what you do in your job changes.

Roberts also brought a Sony eReader with him and passed it around for the students to look at. I won’t say much about this part of the talk, since my friend Graham, over at The Inspired Library School Student blogged about this part in more detail. As for the eReader, I had never seen one in person before, so that was interesting. It was a bit heavier then I was expecting, but I’d still love to buy one. However, at this point I just can’t afford it (FAR too many student loans). Though what I’d REALLY want in an eReader is something that you can store pdf files (eg, journal articles) and then be able to write/highlight on them with a stylus, in addition to having e-books. That would have been fabulous for my university career! Something like this would be awesome, except its even more out of my price range then the Sony…

After the talk, a few other members of the CLA student group exec went to lunch at Thomson House with Mr. Roberts and Dr. Bouthillier (the director of the SIS department at McGill). That was interesting as well, as we talked a lot about getting hired in libraries and moving up through the ranks to various managerial positions. The cover letter tips were especially helpful, as I’m starting to look at applying for jobs! All in all, it was a great talk/lunch!

My first attempt at starting a library blog didn’t go as well as I’d hoped, but I’m going to try it again. All (or at least most) of the blogs I’ve seen have a theme or specific area of LIS that they discuss. My problem was that I couldn’t think of anything so specific. So I’ve decided that for the time being (in other words, for as long as I’m in library school) I’m just going to blog about a variety of things related to librarianship that interest me, and then I’ll try and narrow it down further when I finally get a bit more settled (aka, actually having a job).

Anyhow, I’m currently re- redesigning my website again as well, so its looking a bit more unpolished then I’d like at the moment. I’m working on it though, so please bear with me until I get everything sorted out!